University of Strathclyde (SPA0033)

About

Founded as a place of useful learning, the University of Strathclyde is an international technical university. Its mission is to make a positive difference to lives of students, society, and the world. The university is located in the Glasgow City Innovation District, a global hub for entrepreneurship, innovation, and collaboration.

University of Strathclyde is home to one of the largest space technology clusters in Europe, providing access to a wide range of developments and expertise. Space activity is embedded across all four university faculties: Engineering; Science; Business School; and, Humanities & Social Sciences.

This submission was led by Malcolm Macdonald who is the Director of the Centre for Signal and Image Processing (CeSIP), and of CeSIP’s Applied Space Technology Laboratory within the Faculty of Engineering. He is also a visiting professor at University College Dublin’s Centre for Space Research, and a director at Weather Stream, a US-based weather data analytics company. He is a former non-executive member of the UK Space Agency Steering Board (2017 – 2020), and was Director of the Scottish Centre of Excellence in Satellite Applications from 2014 – 2020. He will become President of the Royal Aeronautical Society in 2026

This submission was reviewed, commented, and contributed to, in alphabetic order, by, Heather Anderson, Agathe Bouis, Darran Gardner, Joshua Gribben, Jonathan Orr, Steven Owens, Saskia Vermeylen.

Opportunities and Challenges

The UK has a distinctively broad-based space sector, with a diverse set of capabilities underpinned by a world leading academic community. The UK enjoys a position of global leadership in the sector, secured through membership of the European Space Agency (ESA), offering access to a depth and breadth of skills that the UK could not sustain within the current public spending settlement, and so is a vital part of the UK’s global position as a space nation.

The UK currently lacks the depth and breadth of skills and resources to be a top-tier space nation. However, the UK does retain globally leading capabilities in specific aspects of the sector, going beyond science and technology to include law, governance and a vision for how the rule of law can guide space diplomacy, that makes it an attractive partner for international collaboration.

In 2010, the Space Innovation and Growth Strategy (IGS) established a twenty-year vision for the UK’s space sector. This established the UK as a global thought-leader, with many countries emulating aspects of that original vision through significant government investment. Since then, the UK sector has outgrown the global space sector. However, much of this occurred in the first half of the subsequent decade. Subsequent growth has broadly matched, or at times fallen below global growth trends.

Analysis of public space funding intensity, a ratio of public space budgets to Gross Domestic Product, as well as public space budgets as a share of government expenditure shows that the UK spends significantly less than the EU average, and vastly less than countries such as France, Japan, and Luxembourg[1].

The Space IGS recommended the creation of a UK Space Agency to, amongst other things, create a central point for space within government as a replacement for the previously dispersed approach. Today, despite the existence of the UK Space Agency, space is returning to a similarly dispersed approach. Space must be better coordinated across government, at UK and devolved levels, and the committee should explore the establishment of a Minister for Space to provide this coordination.

The UK’s space sector needs to better engage with adjacent technology sectors, both in and outside government. For space to deliver its promised potential it needs to transition to an outward looking, underpinning sector of the economy that is ubiquitous across a vast range of sectors in a similar fashion to sectors such as artificial intelligence, communications, and data analytics.

Globally, the space sector is transitioning away from the concepts of ‘up’ and down’ stream. The sector is becoming more agile and integrated, more ‘cross’ stream, whilst the UK’s sector remains slow to respond. Within the UK this integration is perhaps most evident in Scotland’s manufacturing (upstream) capability, with companies acting as service providers (downstream), who also build spacecraft, rather than as merely manufactures. This shift offers higher margins, as well as enabling the rapid deployment of novel capabilities that provide unique commercial advantage, often from within the UK’s leading academic community; itself a key attractor to inward investors. Likewise, global launch operators are seeking to move up the value chain by offering satellite services, risking UK launch operators alongside satellite manufacturers becoming ‘the squeezed middle’ if the sector remains slow to respond to global trends.

The UK, along with much of Europe, has focused on the smaller end (by mass) of the launch market, where, of late, several companies have suffered technical, and consequently financial failures. The launch market, globally, is continuing to rapidly change and evolve. The UK must ensure increased vigilance to not pursue a speculative and dated business case in a rapidly evolving market and geopolitical environment.

The UK accounts for significantly more so-called new space Earth observation companies than any other ESA member state, with around 22% of such companies in ESA member states. With these companies, the UK accounts for around 23% of employment, with a 17% market share. By comparison, Germany accounts for around 15% of new space Earth observation companies in ESA member states, but 22.5% employment, and 26.5% market share.[2]

The UK has been a global leader in modern regulation of space activities with the Space Industry Act 2018, delivering a new global benchmark. However, for the UK to deliver on its ambitious National Space Strategy it must further strengthen its legal and regulatory platform to ensure support and growth of a safe and sustainable space sector. Concurrently, the UK must not only recognise that it operates in a global marketplace, ensuring its legal and regulatory environment is an attractor to launch operators, but also ensure that it is more agile, responsive, and prompt than global competitors.

Regulation of space must ensure consideration of the interest of all stakeholders, including the scientific community, technologically less-privileged countries, and the wider public, regarding the consequences of authorising activities and in a manner that is sustainable for the present and future generation. Consideration should also be given to developing a sound mechanism to share and transfer space technology without endangering national security or engendering further inequities.

The commercial nature of the sector distorts the nature of R&D investment, towards the mid- to high-Technology Readiness Levels (TRL)[3]. Consequently, and in a global context, the sector is under-represented and under-active in the lower TRL range, in fundamental research. This predisposition is repeated throughout the sector, in its representations and its governmental support with, for example, a tendency to focus on the commercially-valuable outputs of the innovation pipeline rather than the inputs. This issue is exemplified by the long-standing discrepancies in the funding of basic research, with space engineering topics such as astrodynamics being omitted from UK Research and Innovation funding.

Globally, space is at an inflection point, transitioning from limited access to mass-participation. In March 2023, a report commissioned for ESA noted that “space is undergoing a revolution comparable to the growth of the Internet 20 years ago”, with the “race for geopolitical influence and future economic gain … further accelerating.” Today, as space becomes increasingly strategic, governments openly recognise space as both an operational and a contested domain. Meanwhile, as globalisation and interdependencies grow, the international order faces continual challenges with multinational alliances undergoing both significant transformation and disruption.

Space, and access to it, is pivotal to life in the UK: space and satellite services support around 16% (more than £360Bn) of the UK’s GDP,[4] and are an integral part of our critical national infrastructure. Consequently, in a changing world, the UK must secure assured access to space, spanning launch services as well as on-orbit capabilities. Such assured access to space would allow the UK to provide for itself and act as a trusted ally to partner nations.

Assured Access: space as a system of systems

Space is a dual-use environment. The Ministry of Defence has made significant steps towards re-establishing a sovereign defence space capability. Much of this, by necessity as well as logic, builds on prior UK civil investment, and future developments should pre-emptively seek out such civil-defence synergies. However, these interactions tend to be uneven across the sector with a predisposition that can overlook UK-wide capabilities.

The UK Government should seek to, as part of the National Space Strategy and the Defence Space Strategy, secure assured access to space. Providing an end-to-end sovereign capability, that allies can rely on, thus securing UK leadership position in the space sector and operational domain.

Academia should be recognised as a key sector enabler for UK-wide, and SME engagement in the space defence and security sector, this should also act as a landing runway for inward investment. Greater support for engaging academia and SMEs in higher security classification discussions is required for a truly assured space sector.

To realise assured access to space, the UK Government should ensure maximum and prompt support for Project PRISM, a £100Mn project within the Glasgow City Region Investment Zone, funded pending final approvals, which will increase the capacity for UK-wide space sector growth by connecting and integrating the full pathway of support for research and development, product development, testing & validation, manufacturing scale-up, deployment and launch, and data analytics and services. PRISM, led by the University of Strathclyde, will deliver new infrastructure to enable high-security collaboration for responsive space, based in Glasgow, that connects with the wider UK Space and Defence Sectors.

Assured access to space requires multiple providers of services and capabilities to ensure tactical responsiveness. As such it should be developed within the context of enhanced defence spending and deeper defence co-operation with European partners. This requires a system of systems approach and should cover, but not be limited to, workforce planning, access to space, and tactically responsive capabilities of access, data, services, and assets on-orbit, and not be viewed as a launch specific capability.

The UK National risk register should further recognise the importance of space to life in the UK, alongside the current lack of assured access to space and dependency on non-UK space-based assets; such as GPS and the Copernicus Programme. The risk register should also recognise the importance of space to the UK’s resilience and ability to recover after major civil and/or national security disruption, and the potential for growth in adversarial actions to hinder access to these assets.

Cyber security in the space sector is attracting significant global attention with, for example, ESA launching a ‘Space Shield’ tool to collect attack tactics, techniques, and procedures to enable strengthening of space system security. The trend to build cybersecurity into the space ecosystem from a ‘secure-by-design’ perspective arises at a time when internationally there is a global shortage of skilled cyber security experts. Assured access to space requires a holistic skills development strategy, reaching beyond the traditional confines of the space sector. The opportunity to lead in ‘secure-by-design’ cyber security resilience offers a differentiating capability to the UK which would simultaneously create a skilled workforce in the dual emerging domain of cyber and space: addressing skills shortages in both sectors.

Academia needs to be viewed as a key enabler and core part of the sector that is integral to future growth. Further recognition should be given to the value of basic research as the pipeline of future commercial innovations, that engineering science underpins the technical innovations of the future as well as providing the skilled workforce of the future. Moreover, academia should be viewed as a ‘customer friend’ to enable government to extend the concept of sustainable and assured access to space to the delivery of public services, this could include, for example, secondment into the civil service, establishing user needs to provide customer pull of space services that will drive both satellite manufacturing and launch customers to help secure a sustained long-term pipeline of launch activity.

As the current landscape of space activity outpaces existing legal and regulatory frameworks, there is a growing imperative to formulate comprehensive, future-oriented governance structures. Government should further engage with academia, particularly scholars in the social sciences and humanities, to gain critical, imaginative, and interdisciplinary perspectives that can inform the development of equitable, sustainable, and forward-looking space law and policy.

A Sustainable Space Economy

Sustainability of the space environment is a key sector-wide challenge, and opportunity. Much like the terrestrial environment, this is more than wealth creation and must be viewed in the context of losses incurred in an unsustainable space environment. Space has the potential to become a trillion-dollar sector in the 2030’s, with the UK well positioned to secure a significant share of that if future investment is astutely targeted at ‘moving the dial’. Failure to preserve another natural environment from irresponsible human actions jeopardises this opportunity, alongside the vital contribution space makes to our way of life, and to mitigating the impact of humans on the Earth’s ecosystem, and to the NetZero transition.

Stewardship of the space environment must be viewed as an integral part of assured access to space, touching all parts of the system of systems and not just about ensuring situational awareness and a safe operating environment in space due to factors such as space weather and space debris. The University of Strathclyde, with funding support from UK Space Agency, has recently completed a year-long project focused on this stewardship approach[5]. In 2025, efforts will be made to ensure the sustainability of this initiative to ensure that it can continue to deliver innovation support to industry across the TRL levels.

Development of a national, sustained space launch capability without a sustained government customer is, probably, unprecedented. EU Exit has likely removed a possible government customer for UK launch. The UK should continue to pursue ESA launch from Scotland whilst also seeking to ensure UK government, for example the Ministry of Defence, UK Research and Innovation, and similar, regularly launch from the UK.

Given the heavily integrated nature of the sector across Europe and the UK, our exit from the EU has amplified extant recruitment difficulties, as well as making it more challenging for UK nationals to gain wider professional experience. As such, a new skills development strategy is required to ensure the UK space sector reaches its full potential.

Space is an inter-disciplinary sector that draws on a very broad range of skills and capabilities, all of whom correctly identify as part of the space sector. However, the sector is highly imbalanced: 29% female, minorities underrepresented, advantaged socioeconomic backgrounds overrepresented. Simultaneously, the sector has an acute, multifaceted skills shortage that is in-part due to the sectors success, with growth outpacing skills supply. The immediate skills shortage hinders sector growth, whilst preventing the sector from performing the planning that would secure growth and eradicate the skills shortage: keeping the sector in a ‘firefighting’ mode. Moreover, the transdisciplinary nature of the sector makes in-job training and staff retention critical. Yet, company size typically makes such training challenging, while sector growth creates opportunities for experienced and skilled staff that makes staff retention challenging. Addressing this market failure and the sectors diversity issues, in all its forms, is critical.

The UK space sector skills shortage is not isolated from similar shortages in other sectors, seeking similar skills. Often these other sectors are more established, with multiple large primes. Consequently, these other sectors are able to co-invest with skills providers to ensure development of tailored programmes to address skills gaps. The space sector suffers from a structural market failure whereby this type of co-investment is not happening. As such, there is a need to find a means to allow companies, colleges, and universities to collaboratively invest in addressing the skills shortage; likely with some initial government funding to resolve the market failures. In this regard, inspiration should be drawn from other sectors which have resolved similar issues in the past, such as the Power Academy at the University of Strathclyde[6].  There is also an opportunity to co-invest with other sectors in interventions to address common skills gaps, in creating interest and enthusiasm for STEM subjects and in creating near-frictionless mechanisms to enable non-traditional career pathways (e.g. veterans, career-break returners and mid-career switchers) into the sector.

The UK has a unique opportunity to lead globally by building on its foundational role in establishing the International Sustainability Standards Board at COP26 in Glasgow. To maintain this leadership and deliver a truly forward-looking, science-based approach to corporate sustainability disclosures, satellite data should be embedded within the UK Sustainability Reporting Standards (UK SRS) under the Sustainability Disclosure Requirements framework[7]. Earth observation provides independently verifiable, high-frequency, and spatially granular data essential for tracking environmental impacts across global value chains — including deforestation, water stress, land use change, biodiversity loss, and forced human migration. Integrating satellite-derived indicators alongside financial disclosures will enhance double materiality assessments and enable more credible, consistent, and comparable reporting aligned with the UK’s net zero and nature-positive goals. The UK’s existing capabilities in the space sector make this not only feasible but a strategic advantage.

16 April 2025